Top 6 Mistakes People Make with Their Messaging and How to Avoid Them
Creating the right message for your product or service isn’t easy. What is easy is falling into the trap of talking about the features of that product as if they are the benefits. It’s easy to list out what the product does in technology terms and jargon. But if you go this route, you’re simply forgetting about one key thing: buyers and users of your product or service are human.
Okay, you knew that, sure. But hear me out. If you’re not writing for the human, the one who feels and remembers, you’re losing out on really making your messaging sing. You are easily going to fall into the trap of making it sound like every other product out there, competing on features and functionality instead on how your particular solution makes the user feel and how it improves their work.
Notice I keep repeating the words “the user” and “their work.” Remember, your product is about what it does for them, not you or your company. This is key.
This isn’t being flowery and trying to make everything a Hallmark commercial to get your product to sell. No tears of joy need be shed, especially for an B2B product. But what if you could evoke a certain excitement in your audience? What if you could paint a picture of how your solution makes their work better? Or elevates their standing in the company? Or allows them freedom to focus on something else because the one big baddie they hate doing is solved for?
Top 6 Mistakes People Make with Their Messaging
I’ve worked on messaging my entire career, either creating it from scratch or receiving it from a product marketing manager to polish it for external facing content and materials. These are the biggest mistakes I see people make with their messaging:
Too feature focused.
Conflating features with benefits.
Making the message so high-level or using a single message to apply to multiple audiences that in the end it doesn’t communicate anything to anyone.
Using competitors’ messages as example of what they should be writing for their own product or service.
Not talking to customers to find out what got them hooked on the product.
Not refreshing messages on a consistent basis.
Customer perspective
Let’s start with #5 because I think this is the most egregious error one can make.
Unless you’re a very early-stage startup with no customers, you have customers to tap for this. And you should be talking to them on a regular basis. Not just the sales guys when they need to sell them more product or a customer service rep when they need to solve a problem. Product marketing and marketing team members need to be sitting down with customers on a regular basis to find out what they’re using the product for and where they are finding value.
You need to make time every month, one or two hours in that month, to have a 30 minute to hour long conversation with a few customers. Choose them based on their unique characteristics: company sizes, revenue spent with you, industry, region, etc. Diversify who you talk to to get the biggest bang for your buck, timewise.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog about writing a great customer story, the thing you think is driving usage with your customers could, in fact, not be the thing. It could be something entirely different, which becomes the foundation for a great, actionable, excitement-inducing message.
Feature-focused and features are not benefits
Let’s go back to #1 and #2, since they go hand in hand. I’ll say it again, features are not benefits and benefits are not features.
Features are the things that the product does.
Benefits are the value derived from using that feature or collection of features.
Let’s take smartphones as an example because nearly everyone can relate.
Features: Phone, text messaging, camera, navigation device, clock, repository of applications, etc.
Benefits:
Allows me to communicate with everyone in my friend and family network in multiple ways to stay connected;
Keeps me organized, thus reducing my stress;
Acts as an assistant because it can take notes, sends messages, makes appointments, which everyone needs;
Tracks my meals, workouts, and biofeedback so that I can make better decisions about my health;
Allows me to do my chores from a single device saving me a ton of time: banking, order food, play a game, make travel plans, order my dog a treat or a new collar, etc.
When we focus on the features in our messages, unless you know that particular feature is the only thing that people truly care about, you force the customer to interpret why this should be important to them. If you make a customer work too hard to make the connection, you risk them turning to your competitor who is saying something similar OR basing their buy/no-buy decision on only that set of features that you’ve named. Don’t turn your product or service into a commodity. Tell them how they will benefit from your product so they don’t turn to someone else.
The message is too high-level or too generic (#3)
When a message is too high-level or not descriptive, your message becomes noise. Also, if you have more than one target audience for your product or service and you try to be everything to everyone in a single message, you’re diluting it and it ultimately won’t apply to anyone. Different audiences buy for different reasons and you need to give each it’s due attention. Create messages for the specific audience you are serving. For instance, in larger organizations, decision makers and users are different audiences. Find out what makes each tick and be specific.
Now, if you can’t afford to market to two different audiences, that’s okay. You have a few alternatives:
Determine which audience will be more profitable (short- and long-term) and target them.
Or, if they’re both equally profitable, rotate your messages and how you target those audiences. This could be alternating messages/delivery channels each week or each month. Tip: You need to determine a cadence that keeps you in their evoked set so it’s not a net new effort every time you target that audience again.
Using competitors’ messages as examples
This is a huge no-no for me. You should understand what your competitor does and how your own product or service is different from theirs so that you can document that well. BUT, if you use their messaging as a basis to create yours, you’re in trouble. You’ve set your baseline and it’s hard to think differently, to be creative. This is often why consultants are brought in to create new messages, because they have fresh eyes.
Again,
go back and talk to customers.
encourage your sales teams to fill out win-loss reports with usable information that you then review regularly: “Customer X chose us over Competitor Y because our UX allowed them to see exactly where the problem in their network resides. Competitor Y’s product required them to drill down into each database to review and prioritize actions. They found ours to be easy to use, saved time and money, and streamline their internal processes for dealing with misconfigurations.”
Wrapping Up
Like I said at the top of this blog, creating messaging for your product or service isn’t easy. But it is critical to your success. Building a great messaging foundation helps you build other great pieces of content, helps your sales team sell, allows your marketing team to generate and capture demand, and gets you the attention of your customers.
Once you’ve built that foundation, the last step I mentioned above is to refresh that messaging on a consistent basis. This doesn’t have to mean every month or even every quarter. But you should be taking a look at your messaging at least twice a year, especially if you’re a SaaS company. Products and services get updated all the time and that may mean even better capabilities and benefits for your customers. Make sure that update makes it to your website, to your social accounts, to your sales content, into your messaging documents.
And remember, customers are the key. Talk to them. Engage with them. You’ll be happy you did.
If you have any questions about this blog or want to talk about your marketing needs, please send me an email at rosa@rosalear.com or fill out my contact form, I’ll be happy to speak with you.
